how to make my website load faster?
always webmasters and business owner have been asking this question. making your website load faster is becoming one of the leading factors in SEO and making visitors convert into clients.
Well, making a website load faster can be broken down to a few simple ways. These ways include:
- Choose high-performance hosting
- shrinking the file sizes of images
- Optimize JS and CSS files
- Website caching
- Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
1- choose high-performance hosting
there is 3 popular plan for hosting:
shared hosting
VPS hosting
dedicated hosting
every web hosting provider has these plans. choosing right web hosting plan is the first thing you can do to make your website faster, or you can upgrade your current hosting.
however, don’t choose shared hosting with minimum features to save your money if you looking for faster website load. VPS hosting is probably the option you want to go with.
Dedicated servers are usually much more expensive. It’s essentially like owning an own computer.
2- shrinking the file sizes of images
its simple equation: The larger website images = slower website.
you can optimize images before uploading them to your website by Changing image Resolution, reducing the “quality” of the image by photoshop or any photo editor and you can be Cropping the image by cutting out unneeded areas to make the image smaller in size.
3-OPTIMIZE JS AND CSS FILES
you can optimize it by two ways: minification and compression.
gzipping is done at the server level.
combine and minify your CSS and JavaScript files by using some online tool like www.minifier.org
or you can just make a search in google using a keyword like minify js or minify CSS, then pick your preferred online tools from the search result.
4-website CACHING
web Pages caching is store static files (HTML and images), which allow repeat visitors to access that page more quickly since the database does not have to retrieve each file every time there is a request.
The thing with caching, First-time site visitors won’t have the site cached yet, since the page needs to load files at least once before it stores them.
5. USE A CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK (CDN)
A CDN is delivering web content to users based on their geographic location, means big performance improvements for website users. for example, if a person accessing the website in Jordan, they will be retrieving web content from a server nearby.
Cloudflare and Incapsula are both free CDN and can speed up your website, Cloudflare is a good place to start.
what you can store on a CDN:
- CSS files
- JS files
- Images
- Other uploaded files (like videos, PDFs)
common CDNs include:
- MaxCDN
- CloudFlare
- Amazon CloudFront